In honor of 11 Nissan, the 109^th birthday of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of blessed memory, Lubavitch.com chose to feature an interview with a distinguished scholar who discusses the transformative impact that the Rebbe has had on his life.

 Naftali Loewenthal caught my interest about twenty years ago when his book, Communicating the Infinite, was issued by Chicago University Press. The Chabad Chasid, a Ph.D in Jewish history who wrote his dissertation on the second Chabad Rebbe at University College London, lectures on topics such as Hasidism and Modernity, Gender in Orthodoxy, Science in Chassidic Thought  in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL.

 With his own interests in art, poetry and music, Naftali explored Chabad Chasidism as a young scholar in search of sustaining truths.  A father of eleven children, Naftali is widely appreciated as a teacher of Chabad Chasidism—its texts and its applied ideals and values. Naftali lives in London with his wife Kate-Miriam, who holds an emeritus Chair of  Psychology at London University and currently lectures at New York University in London. 

Baila Olidort: You and your wife are the parents of a large family, and most of your children are Chabad Shluchim today. But you weren’t raised in a Chabad home.

Naftali Loewenthal: I come from a mixture of Yekkish (German) Jews who were very much under the Hirschian influence—my father’s family, and Chasidic Jews on my mother’s side.

My mother’s great grandfather was a Chasid of the Kotzker Rebbe. Her ancestors lived in Vitebsk and eventually, one of her ancestors who wanted to become a Kotzker left White Russia for Kotzk, where he became a Chasid from the inner circle of the Kotzker Rebbe, and his children became Gerer Chasidim.

My father escaped the Nazis to Israel, and my mother moved from London to Israel, where I was born in 1944 in Haifa.

I am named for my father, who unfortunately passed away in an epidemic before I was born.

But you grew up in England?

Yes, we left Israel when I was only 18 months, but I never felt myself part of the English paradigm.

Even in secondary school—which was not Jewish but had a high percentage of Jewish boys, I was always out of the English box. After school I began studying psychology at University College London—the first Godless university in England, set up on agnostic and humanistic principles.

But I dropped out in my first year there because I didn’t want the falseness of academia. I decided I wanted to be a writer. This was around 1967. I was in my early 20s. My wife and I were living a very solitary life in the mountains above Bethesda, North Wales.

Kate-Miriam had her first job lecturing in Psychology at University of Bangor, about 15 miles away. At that time, in addition to writing and a bit of drawing, I began to focus on Jewish studies. I spent a lot of time studying Chumash and Rashi, Mishnah and Talmud.  In my childhood I had studied Torah in junior school and then in the evening Etz Chaim Yeshivah in North London when I was 14. Now I was trying to catch up.

Once a week, a box would come on the railway train with kosher stuff for Shabbos meals from a Jewish butchery in Manchester. But apart from that, we lived a very solitary life there and it was a deeply formative part of my experience.

After two years, we returned to London and I began studying again in UCL. I became very interested in Chasidism. Although my grandparents were Chasidic in their origin, I hadn’t really seen living Chasidism.

How did you get interested in Chassidism?

Well, in my first year at UCL, I took a course with Professor Yossi Weiss. He gave a course on Gezeiras Ashkenaz, about the beginning of the Crusades in the Middle Ages, 1096, where the Jews were attacked in the towns along the Rhineland, and many took their own lives rather than face forced baptism.  He taught it with enormous passion. 

Weiss was fascinated by Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, so that sparked my own interest in Braslav and I began to learn Likkutei Moharan. Later when I was spending a semester studying at Hebrew U, I met Rabbi Gedaliah Koenig, a prominent Braslav teacher, and studied with him three times a week in his home in Mea Shearim.  At that time also, my family in Jerusalem would often take me to the tisch of the Beis Yisroel, the Gerer Rebbe.

Yossi Weiss died around that time, right?

Yes, at the end of my first year at UCL. He was a remarkable person, with many paradoxes in his life.  The complexity of his relationship with Gershom Scholem is well-known.  I heard from the late Professor Chimen Abramsky that in the last weeks of his life, he began his letters with a “Baruch Hashem.” When he passed away, he was wearing his Tallit and Tefillin. He was a very profound person.

So was Weiss your first contact with Chasidic thought?

When I was a boy, although I usually davened in the Adath Yisroel (Yekkish) shul near my home,  the shtiebl of Rabbi Meshulam Ashkenazi, the Stanislova Rebbe, was very prominent as an alternative, intensive style of Yiddishkeit. My grandfather would often daven there.  He would also tell me stories about his experiences as an Aleksander Chossid in Poland. In 1917 he had come from Warsaw, via Antwerp, to London as a Chazan, but then became a businessman.  Reb Meshulam Ashkenazi was one of the most obviously spiritual figures in London at that time.  Unbeknown to me, Reb Meshulam then had a relationship with Rabbi Bentzion Shemtov, and taught for him in what Rabbi Shemtov considered the incipient ‘Tomchei Temimim’ of London.  

I had some friends, two brothers, Freddy and Morris Joy, (Josefovich) whose family also davened at Reb Meshulam’s shtiebl. They are descendants of Reb Menachem Mendel of Rimanov (d.1815).  Their parents escaped from mainland Europe during the war, and they were part of the small London Chasidic community, and friends with Reb Mushulam’s son Iri, who is now the Stanislova Rebbe. 

Freddy, himself an artist, has a tremendous appreciation of art, literature and music, in a unique way, and also of the teachings and stories of the Chasidim.  A kind of hidden Savant, he would speak of Kafka, Lev Chestov, Kandinsky, Miro, Schoenberg, Miles Davis, many other figures – and the Chassidim.

We would sit and read Siach Sarfei Kodesh—aphorisms of the Kotzk and Pzsyscho schools of thought—and we’d explore some mystical statement from these sources together.  This gave me a very spiritualized view of Chasidism.

Who else did you encounter during this early period?  I mean, in terms of Chasidism?

Well, later at UCL there was Ada Rapaport who is a colleague and close friend of my wife and me to this day. She was doing a PhD on Rabbi Nachman of Braslav, and has since written extensively about Chasidism.  During my semester at the Hebrew University I also attended courses by Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Yossi Dan and others.  In terms of medieval Jewish history there was Haim Hillel ben Sasson. I attended lectures by him at HU about mesirut nefesh and Kiddush Hashem in medieval Spain and Ashkenaz in a very moving way—he could hold 200 students in a lecture hall spellbound.

How did that happen?

When we first moved back to London I had come into the Lubavitch Centre and met Rabbi Shmuel Lew.  He had just been appointed Lubavitch Student Counselor, and I was his first student. I asked him if he would arrange a study partner for me in gemara. He picked up the phone and, on the spot, made an arrangement for me to learn with Rabbi Tuvia Cohen, now living in Manchester. He is a serious Talmud scholar. He was very generous with his time, and we would study Bava Kama for two hours four evenings a week. And once in a while he’d say, you want to learn Chasidut? And I’d say no, only gemara.

Occasionally, Rabbi Lew would give a class at the university, and I’d go. I remember that he gave a wonderful presentation of the Chasidic discourse, Basi L’Gani, about shtus d’kedusha, “Sacred Folly.”  There is a line of Reason, rationality. Below this is negative folly, which leads to sin and other negative things.  But “Sacred Folly” rises above the line of Reason. It is expressed in mesirat nefesh, intense dedication to G-d.  In fact the “Sacred Folly” redeems the negative folly. I found this fascinating.

It was at this time both my wife and I began to get excited about Chabad Chassidic teachings. My wife’s doctorate was on Psycholinguistics, and she was fascinated by some striking passages about language in Chabad teachings, for example the end of section 19 in Iggeret HaKodesh in Tanya.  I was intrigued by section 4 of Iggeret Hakodesh which presents the concept of “alienation” very much as described by Karl Marx: the person alienates their self, seeing it in their wealth. They both saw the same problem. But they had different solutions to the problem! For Marx, revolution; for Rabbi Shneur Zalman, giving Tzedaka.

At that time, did you meet any other significant Chabad Chassidim?

Well, a very important figure in London Lubavitch at that time was the legendary Reb Mendel Futerfas.  During my Summer vacation of 1969, for a period of a few weeks, I would meet with him early in the morning and we would study Likkutei Torah and sometimes Tanya.  His approach was not overtly to try to make me a Lubavitcher, it was to help me become a Chasid. He felt that everyone has to be a Chasid, because if you’re not a Chasid, then who is your Rebbe?

You yourself are your own Rebbe—and mechanically you cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, because you don’t have any outer objective reality to measure yourself by, you are your own Rebbe.

So everyone has a Rebbe—either the Rebbe is their own ego, or they have a Rebbe of some kind. From Reb Mendel I understood that you need a Rebbe—that was an important step for me.

Reb Mendel is still referred to today as a model Chasid. He sat in Soviet prisons for almost a decade.

Yes, and he once said to me, “a lot of people were very unhappy in lager [prison camp].”

That was the statement—I felt this was an incredibly significant point of reality in terms of what life is about, what being a human being is—broader even than being a Jew. In my juvenile mind—to “live” was what I wanted to do, and I saw Reb Mendel as a person who was living. He described his nine years in lager as “a long farbrengen without mashke”—that was his experience of it.

His integrity as a Chasid was intensified by that experience rather than weakened. He said that most people in prison had lost whatever they were—a general, a schoolteacher, but he had was a Chasid, and being incarcerated made no difference to his identity. It’s a completely different way of looking at existence and what your goals are as a person.

Are you saying that everyone has to be a Chasid?

I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say that one has to be himself, herself. The question is: what is the fulcrum that would make a person be himself? The fulcrum which enables the person to discover on some level who he or she is in some measure is the reality of Torah—but they need a teacher whom they love very much, and who becomes that focus in life that enables them to be who they really are, to unfold the bud inside.

And if you have not gone through that experience in some way, of that inner self opening—you cannot know your own force—the source of your own life force, of your energy.

So, did meeting Reb Mendel make you a Chabad Chassid?

Not right away. Another wonderful figure in London at that time was Rabbi Meir Gurkow. He was very old, and found it hard to walk all the way to Lubavitch House. So he would daven in a little shtiebl next door to where he lived.  Well, it just happened, by Divine Providence, that this was the shtiebl where we davened before we began going to Lubavitch. On Shabbos at Shalosh Se’udos he would give a drosho, which I now know was probably from Likkutei Torah. I didn’t understand a word, but it was somehow radiant!

At this time our oldest daughter went to the Lubavitch kindergarten. Then our second daughter was born, at which point I spent the time in Jerusalem which I mentioned earlier, and got involved with Braslav.

When I returned to England I actually began collecting money for Braslav, for a building complex, a Shikun, which Reb Gedalia wanted to build in Safed. That was a big step for me. That was the first time that I understood the meaning of very lofty, esoteric Chasidic teachings translated into something very practical: collecting money for a building complex.  So, I tried to collect money in the Stamford Hill community.  People were sometimes very insulting. But that was important because it helped me see that Chasidut and the real world go together. My appreciation of Chasidut up to then had been very ethereal. It sounds almost paradoxical that while I had so much association with Chabad-Lubavitch, even sending our children to the Lubavitch school, it was my relationship with Braslav which helped me see Chasidism as having a role in This World.

At this point an old friend contacted me, and asked if I would give a shiur, a class at a kind of orthodox Chaburah which had been set up in London, in Golders Green. It was agreed I would teach Likkutei Muharan. Rabbi Shmuel Lew and Reb Ephraim Potash, now also a very prominent  figure in the London Lubavitch community, were both involved with this Chaburah as well.

One of the people in the Chaburah who attended my shiur on Braslav was Mordechai Beck— now a painter and writer living in Jerusalem.  He tried to convince me to go to a class on Chabad Chasidut which he attended, given by Rabbi Nachman Sudak.  He kept saying “You would really find Nachman interesting.”  It was somehow Nachman Nachman—the same name for Rabbi Nachman of Braslav and Rabbi Nachman of Lubavitch.  That helped bridge the gap.

As a result, finally, Mordechai Beck succeeded. Rabbi Nachman Sudak would give a weekly shiur in his home (now it still continues, in Lubavitch House). He was teaching a discourse of the Rebbe Rashab—which is all about Ahavas Yisrael—and it was stunning. He taught it in a particular way, and from then on I went every week to his class. My friend Yakov Korer, who had a degree in philosophy (and is now a brilliant teacher of maths, science and Chasidut in our Lubavitch Senior Girls School) would also come.  After the shiur he would come to my home and we’d learn it again and discuss it.

When did you begin teaching Chabad Chassidic teachings?

That was quite a while later, about two years. The Chaburah came to an end, and some time after that I began giving a similar shiur in Likkutei Muharan at Hillel House. This had become quite popular. I gave what I would call a very free interpretation of Rabbi Nachman’s thought.  At this point I was working with poetry and what you might call mixed media. Then suddenly there was a transformation.  In my head, in my heart, there was a transition: from Braslav to Chabad. It was something very profound.

The Braslav class had become quite large. Then I suddenly switched the content, to Chabad teachings, Likuttei Torah, which I probably hardly understood, on any level.  But, at least I didn’t add any embroidery.  At once the class dwindled from forty down to five.  

How did you feel about that?

 Well with Braslav, I had felt that I could say what I wanted. There was no sense that I need to check it up with another Braslaver, to make sure it was really expressing the teachings of Rabbi Nachman. I didn’t feel that I couldn’t make up my own stuff. But with Likkutei Torah, I was very concerned to be truthful to the text.  I felt what I was saying was real, and the fact that very few people are interested in things that are “real” was not a surprise.

What about now, when you teach Chasidut Chabad? Do you add any personal interpretations?

 That’s a good question. I do, in fact, and on one level that is offending the purist principle of not giving any explanations to Chasidut that do not originate from the Baal Shem Tov.  However, my understanding is that adding explanations, even one’s own interpretations, is part of the attempt to make the wellsprings reach the “outside,” the mind and heart of a person, including my own mind and heart.  In the Introduction to Tanya it says that each person has their own path to Torah, and the goal is how to find one’s own individual route.

How do you reconcile the need to assert individuality, with the lifestyle of a Chasid?

 It is a challenge, I would say it is called pnimius, inwardness. A pnimiusdig Chasid is totally an individual and at the same time totally attuned and connected to the Rebbe. His individuality is expressed in his or her unique perspective on the world.

When you consider the corpus of Chabad Chasidut, you find that you are dealing with something that is bli gvul, or infinite. Communicating or integrating such content means that you are attempting to fit the infinite into our finite, individual personalities. And that will express itself in distinctly individualistic ways in each person.

In that way, no two Chasidim are the same—they are each their own charismatic guide and character, and each will understand the same Chasidic discourse in very different ways. Over the years, working closely with Rabbis Lew, Zvi Telsner and Faivish Vogel, the individualistic side of Chabad Chasidic thought was strongly emphasized. Each of those three people would look at a topic or a problem in a somewhat different way. Rabbi Vogel, for example, can embrace modernistic and individualistic perspectives while at the same time sensing the purist, traditionalist dimension.

The idea of individualism in Chasidism is very important to me—it’s part of the lecture course I give, and the book I am currently writing. I see it in the values and the inwardness of a Chasid, of the way he might bare his own private experience after a few hours of contemplative prayer, and allows others access to that, often in a farbrengen that follows, on a Shabbat afternoon.

What he chooses to share, his discovery from his contemplative prayer experience will be very different from his fellow Chasid. I’ve seen this many times where some of the Chasidic greats spent time in contemplative prayer, and would then come down to “farbreng,” and you could feel the “richness” of the exploration.

Your book, Communicating the Infinite, is based in your Ph.D dissertation.

Yes, after I got my first degree, I dropped out of university again. I felt there was something false in the academic world. So I wanted out and I began looking into other possibilities. Yet somehow or other I came back to doing a Ph.D on Kotsk with Chimen Abramsky as my supervisor.  But it was around that time I became much more involved with Chabad.

When did you meet the Rebbe for the first time?

After two years of writing long letters in Hebrew to the Rebbe, in the Summer of 1973 I went to Crown Heights for the first time for a month. My question to the Rebbe in yechidus –[private audience] was, should I go working on my Ph.D, or should I do a smicha –rabbinical ordination—at Jews College, or should I go into business.

The yechidus with him lasted nine minutes, and when I came out, I remember thinking that the Rebbe lets you see as much of yourself as you can bear.

What do you mean?

 The ego is a monster—the Rebbe holds up a mirror to you, so you see your own coarseness but not too much of it, because otherwise you’d turn to stone, it would have a paralyzing effect.  Yet at the same time, I felt the Rebbe activates a kind of detonator, releasing your own potential.

The Rebbe advised me to go on with my Ph.D. I also asked the Rebbe about writing poetry, and he said, “in your spare time.” And I thought, “a Chasid doesn’t have any spare time.” 

Do you miss writing poetry?

 No. Because I am writing about Chasidut and in doing that I am trying to communicate intimations of the infinite, which is what I’d try to do with poetry.

Do you think that this is within the realm of academic scholarship? Wouldn’t you say the goal of the academe is to be cool and objective?

 I think one has to be able to be critical, and objective, and stand in such a position, cerebrally, that one can see many sides of the same issue.  But if the topic one is exploring is love of the Infinite, or a mystical state of consciousness, one needs to be able to be sensitive to that as well.  I admire very much what Elliot Wolfson has done in Open Secret—he has internalized Chasidic texts, maamarim, and is evaluating them in a very profound and meaningful way. I believe he’s entered totally into the picture within the context, beyond being a professor, but as a person. But that is what a good professor should strive to be.

Didn’t you say you originally planned to write a Ph.D on Kotsk?

 Yes, back in 1973, after my first yechidus I went back to London, and I got a job in Lubavitch Girls School which I continue to this day. By now I was much more involved with Lubavitch. And I began thinking that I’d like to change topic of my Ph.d to a Chabad topic. I felt that if I have to spend thousands of hours reading texts, I’d rather read Chabad texts.  Also, one of the problems with researching Kotsk was the lack of material.

So the next year, when I had yechidus again with the Rebbe, I asked about changing my dissertation topic to the Rebbe Rashab. A book with letters and other material relating to the founding of Tomchei Temimim had been published, and I thought this could help me research a doctorate.  The Rebbe said something like, “it’s very good that you should want to change your topic to Chabad, such as the Mitteler Rebbe.” That  was the year of the bicentennial of the Mitteler Rebbe’s birth—he was born in late 1773, so this was a few months later in the summer of 1974.

Over the years, the Rebbe urged me strongly to finish the PhD.  Then he encouraged me to turn it into an academic book, rather than something popular.

To a great extent the book expresses my thinking about what the essential core of Chabad is, and at that point, I thought of it as communication.  So the book is called Communicating the Infinite, Tthe Emergence of the Chabad School.  The theme of communication is what I saw distinguished Chabad from most other branches of the Chassidic movement.

You are now working on another with a curious title.

Yes, I’m calling it Hippy in the Mikva: The Chabad Paradigm in a World of Change.

After I completed the book, I began changing the ways I thought about Chabad. I began thinking of a more general and universal way of expressing what Chabad is really about. I thought in terms of “drawing the infinite into the finite.”  In a way, that is a more general way to describe “communication.”  But an essential aspect of that process concerns the borders of the finite.  That’s where I began to think of deconstruction as the paradigm—the see the borders that there are between, for example, the individual and the divine, between the individual soul and body, between the Jew and the community, and then to deconstruct those borders—to find a way to open those borders without being destructive.

That’s the great challenge which the Chasidic movement as a whole from the Baal Shem Tov, and Chabad in particular, is emphasizing in its communication of Chasidic thought.

And the Mitteler Rebbe did this—he communicated Chasidut to the widest reach, in terms of the society he was facing. Of course, our Rebbe took all this further in a most remarkable way.  But in the process there are some barriers that have to be lifted, or made porous, and in that process there might be danger, or someone might think there is danger. Hence the controversial nature of Chasidism in its early years, and Chabad today, which continues the early deconstructive essence of Chasidism.

Are these objective paradigms, or are you establishing these paradigms?

 Are paradigms ever objective? I can’t know what the Rebbes were thinking—there was tremendous creativity going on in their work. A friend of mine, David Solomon (well known for his show 2000 years of Jewish History in One Hour,  who has read very widely in Hebrew and other languages, once told me he had read the most amazing book. I asked what it was. He said “it’s by the Rebbe Rashab, and it’s called Yom Tov Shel Rosh Hashana.  It was written in 1906 and it’s incredible.”  I said, “well that’s one of the books of Chabad discourses the Yeshivah students at 770 study very carefully.” He replied, “well, no wonder they have been such an effective force around the world.”

The point is that Chabad Chasidic teaching helps a person internalize what the Written Torah and the Talmud are really about.  The power of Chasidic teaching is that it really can change your whole perspective on the world, existence, and highlight the difference of perspective between the Nefesh ha-Elokit and Nefesh haBehamit, the Divine and Animal Souls – and bring them together. It’s going to affect how you will treat the street cleaner—it has ethical reverberations of all kinds and the way in which you understand Yiddishkeit and how you will raise your children…

 You are a mentor to so many people. What do you tell them about how to understand the idea of Divine Providence in evaluating their own lives, mistakes, bad choices they’ve made, and believing that none of it is coincidental?

I believe that you’ve got to see the world as a chess game which G-d sets up for you.  Whatever moves you made in the past are all part of the situation as it is now, and the spotlight is on you. You are the master of your own destiny—and it is not a matter of regretting the past or fears of the future.

As the Rebbe said in a Maamar of Purim, 1957, the point is to come to a place beyond ordinary rational knowledge where you are able to act in the right way, whether avoiding bad or doing good, because you are operating from your own essence. Of course, you are guided by the Torah and the Code of Jewish Law. But your knowledge of the halachah is a channel for that which is beyond knowledge, the essence. That essence is the Yechidah, the innermost part of the soul, the point at which the individual joins with Yachid, the Infinite Divine.